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That only works if the ad requires javascipt a lot of them are just nested iframes. I've been very happy with the noscript iframe setting! most sites only use iframes now for ads and if I need it I can still enable it for just the domain that I need it for.

Also, turn off 3rd party cookies. And run an ad blocker. That will substantially cut down on things. Until things eventually get integrated on the back end so that everything appears to be coming from the site that you're visiting. Like spam, it's an arms race. While spam is 99.8% solved, do not track will be much more challenging.

The problem is, a certain amount of advertising is necessary to make ends meet. The content doesn't pay for itself, and the choices are either to put everything behind a paywall, or have advertising. The tracking/etc. is the ad industry's attempt to make advertising online more profitable: they have a *very* low clickthrough rate to begin with, and hope that by providing targetted advertising, they'll have a better return on investment, and can sell ad impressions for more money.

The problem there is that the advertisers forgot the old adage "you don't shit where you eat".

If they had simply shown a few ads and made sure their servers were up to the task, few if any would have even bothered with ad-blockers. But no, They had to plaster the page with jumping singing dancing ads that pop up and pop under and triple (or worse) the page load time. Then to top it off, they didn't even bother to make sure the ads weren't drive-by viruses or illegal scams.

Since all of that wasn't enough, they decided to also become internet stalkers.

It's only natural that people came to consider most any ad they see on the web to be a probable scam and to run ad blockers to avoid the assault on their senses and more that a few infections as well.

Then finally, when given a chance to restore some tiny shred of good will, they decided to ignore DNT.

Don't forget that they even suck outside of the browser. We had to have an act of congress (not a figurative reference, this actually had to be addressed with your tax money) to stop the hearing loss due to TV and radio ads being 10x louder than the show content.

DNT had exactly one use: to determine whether or not advertisers respect the wishes of people who do not want their browsing habits tracked. The verdict is in, and to nobody's surprise advertisers have no respect for anyone. Now we know that we are justified in using ad-blocking plugins and building browsers that block ads by default.

the fact that people ever thought for a second that they shouldn't have the right to see what they're looking for on a website and not ads or other shit is the problem. It's like when people defend websites that threaten others, saying their ad revenue is the only way they survive when other options exist. Screw ads. Allow em when *you* choose because you're okay with it, not just because you dare to go to websites.

I encourage people to always adblock on techreport, because they threaten to nuke user accoun

Name one public media distribution system that isn't plastered with ads? People don't assume they have a right to ad-free viewing because the don't have that right. If you don't like the ads on a site you have the right to not visit that site and (so far) you have the freedom (not right) to attempt to block the ad.

But you have absolutely no right to tell the site owner that they aren't allowed to put an ad up on their own site any more than you can tell the cable company or radio station that they aren't

Its one thing to put adds in your "private" space. I dislike adds and run adblockers at all time anyway, but I certainly respect that one may do what he wants on -his- website.

Now, we are talking about people profiling YOU. They stalk you wherever you go, take notes of all the things you do, and alter your experience of the internet based on arbitrary criterion. There is a real danger, when some massive "administration" (yeah, I know, the state is the -only- possible evil, large corporations that lock a mar

The problem is that people want content, they dont want to pay for it, and they also dont want advertising. Unfortunately, you cant have all 3.

to determine whether or not advertisers respect the wishes of people who do not want their browsing habits tracked. The verdict is in, and to nobody's surprise advertisers have no respect for anyone.

And shopkeepers have no respect for people who want goods without paying. If you dont want the advertising, dont consume content from an ad-supported site. Make your own webpage, social network, whatever-- thats a lot of the strength of the internet.

You are acting like tracking and advertising are inseparable. They are not, you can advertise without tracking people and you can make money doing so. I do not want to be tracked, and the only technical solution at this point is to block advertisements -- because even loading a static image from an advertiser will be used as a data point to track me.

If a website wants me to view its ads, it should refuse the business of advertisers that create privacy-invading ads. If websites were standing up for their users they would not be at risk of becoming collateral damage in this fight.

Tracking is done by the webmaster. The technical solution is to use a website whose webmaster isnt using tracking. Google Analytics doesnt accidentally find itself on a website; its placed there intentionally.

Analytics doesn't track you across websites. It really does very little beyond what server logs provide. The one advantage is a cookie that says you are a repeat visitor. Also it is a same domain cookie so no other sites can access it. Google does have access to the data but its not attached to a unique record so they can't build an individual profile for you.

Look at your net traffic in a dev console. Google uses beacons. They are gifs and both start with utm_. Look at those request/response entries. You'll see exactly what is and is not sent. They do not track mouse events unless the website specifically is set up to do so and they are limited to a few tens of events per site, not enough for full coverage.

There are tools that track every input. Some are sampled like Clicktale. They record up to 10% of all sessions so you could be caught there but they also have

I agree that it's inconsistent to complain about ads on unpaid content. However, advertising does not require tracking. The page that the ad is served on is in many cases already sufficient context to deliver a relevant ad.

Imagine that you've just been shopping around for a new pair of shoes. You like Nike so you went to Nike.com. They set a remarketing cookie. You want to price compare and find more reviews, so off you go to Amazon. Then you get distracted by a book you want and forget about shoes.

The next day you hop online and go to a tech blog. They serve ads to pay the bills. Now the article you are reading has nothing to do with shoes ( its abou

Does your scenario ever actually happen, though? I've been on the internet long enough to know that you just don't click on ads. If you want Nike shoes, you go directly to to nike.com or your favorite online shoe store.

Clicking on internet ads is like clicking links in spam email. There's absolutely no reason to trust that you'll end up where you want to go.

You kind of answered your own question. You saw the Nike ad, but since you know better than to click it, you just went to Nike.com. They still got your business. If it had been an ad for Adidas, again, you know better than to click it, but you may just stroll on over to the Adidas site. This kind of ad response is hard to measure since you can't really count the clicks (since you know better), but as the advertiser you want to know if your campaign was successful so they have resorted to this kind of tr

It's startling how much ad banners are actually clicked. I don't remember how long ago, but a bunch of data was revealed on the kind of numbers behind people clicking ads, and it was staggering. It wouldn't be so prevalent if it wasn't actually helpful. Even if you go directly to Nike.com in his example, the ad still served its purpose, and there may even still be ad revenue as a result of referrer information leading from a site with the ad to nike's website.

Here's why. Imagine that you've just been shopping around for a new pair of shoes....Then you get distracted The next day you... go to a tech blog.... but look right there, an ad for Nike. Your memory kicks in and you recall shopping for shoes.

How the hell do you forget that you are looking for new shoes? You get reminded every time you put your old ones on.

The Nike ad is right they [sic] so you click and then buy. Was the retargeted ad helpful to you? Some would say yes. Was it invasive? Maybe. Did you buy a pair of shoes from the company that used retargeted ads, absolutely.

No I wouldn't buy the Nikes, because an advert popping up in the middle of a tech blog will piss me off, and if it were not intrusive I would not even notice it on an unrelated site.

What you people ignore is the piss-off factor. There may be some people who will buy something because it took over their screen, but others (like me) will be so annoyed that it is

If advertisers DID heed the DNT request and not track those who see their ads, fewer people would even bother to reach for ad blockers. But the greed was stronger. Why only benefit from people seeing your ads when you can as well sell their profile while you're at it?

And now the greedy call those defending against their greed greedy. That's really rich.

Bullshit - ad blockers were popular well before tracking became the issue, most people wanted to block ads because they didn't want to see them, not because they gave a fuck about being tracked or not. The tracking issue has only become widely followed in the past couple of years.

Of course. Ad blockers have been around... well, I guess at the very least since the advent of full-size, flashing ads that blare obnoxious "PAY ATTENTION TO ME!" noise from every speaker attached.

The difference is magnitude. And that, in turn, depends on how much the average user is willing to put up with vs. the ease or difficulty to get rid of it. Being tracked is just another brick in that wall. You might notice that ad blocking didn't sweep across the nation over night when yesterday everyone and their

Good point, now if only all the browsers would remove this extra, completely useless code and maybe build in something that *really* works. Too bad the major ones would never have the balls to go the extra mile by introducing *real* anti-tracking (and anti-advertisement in general) features.

DNT had exactly one use: to determine whether or not advertisers respect the wishes of people who do not want their browsing habits tracked. The verdict is in, and to nobody's surprise advertisers have no respect for anyone. Now we know that we are justified in using ad-blocking plugins and building browsers that block ads by default.

Careful, advertisers like Google have paid Adblock Plus to whitelist their ads [techcrunch.com]. Sure it's google ads today, but Google owns the vast majority of online ad networks and commands practically all the online ad markets, and if they're paying off the ad blockers to whitelist...

And of course, Google is naturally tracking you. Especially whitelisted.

I encourage people to always adblock on techreport, because they threaten to nuke user accounts that talk about using adblocking. That's not the right approach.

It depends. Sites depend on ads to pay for content and hosting, and many with "premium" options do not allow talk of ad blockers as well. Even reputable ones - like Ars Technica. Even the merest hint of ad blocking without whitelisting the site in question is out. I got banned for mentioning noscript and didn't even mention blocking the site's ads, just it happened to block a good chunk of ads.

Of course, one side effect of this is sites get desperate for money and they end up getting sold and re-sold to other companies. It's only a matter of time before pretty much online ads disappear as we know them because websites are all purchased up and owned by a few media conglomerates who bought them for the user information and all that.

Of course, the little guy with a blog who wants to make a couple of bucks won't be able to attract any advertisers because they all went to the big guys with their massive data pools from buying up websites left and right.

Careful, advertisers like Google have paid Adblock Plus to whitelist their ads

Sure, but ABP has an easy-to-find checkbox to enable/disable whitelisted ads. There are also many other ad blockers out there that can be used if ABP ever stops working effectively (and being easy to configure).

Careful, advertisers like Google have paid Adblock Plus to whitelist their ads. Sure it's google ads today, but Google owns the vast majority of online ad networks and commands practically all the online ad markets, and if they're paying off the ad blockers to whitelist...

Then those ad blockers get forked [mozilla.org] into non-crippled versions.

I will admit that I was gobsmacked when I got that window after updating ABP to the first version with that garbage, though.

I wish I could mod you higher than 5. This was exactly my thoughts on the whole DNT fiasco. I knew advertisers would never respect a totally optional flag no matter how evil it made them look in the process. Having confirmation of such creates no remorse when you then take every step you can to block out advertisers.

I really did want to believe in the advertising model for free content on the internet. I stuck up for sites that needed the revenue to continue operating. But advertisers are just too corrupt t

I do have the Do Not Track setting turned on, but only as a final "fuck off." My real lines of defense are disabled third-party cookies, NoScript, DoNotTrackMe and AdBlock Plus. Anyone who really trusts in that header is a nut.

I have actually started to try learning German (have been taking a break from it though), but there's no way I could read a whole article written in it. But if based on your summary you are talking about the automatically whitelisted sites by default... just uncheck the box! All it adds is one step upon first installation that can be performed in under ten seconds to disable the advertising whitelist, and it works just as it did before. No changes that I am aware of, and I have been using it for years.

The real reason I switched is because I don't want to be a part of their extortion scheme.

You see, you are not the victim in this scam, you are the weapon. With millions of users behind them, they can go to advertising networks and say "nice campaign you have there, would be a shame if something happened to it..."

Well, once things noticeably start getting screwy, then I'll jump ship. But last time I checked, there wasn't even a Adblock Plus fork that was maintained to the level of the original and kept up-to-date. I figure with the extension being as popular as it is, once the time comes that it really is best to leave ABP behind, the developers of the forks will finally start to take the maintenance of their extensions seriously and ABP will finally have a worthy alternative. I doubt that that's changed in the l

Advertisers sound like they were willing to play along if W3C was up for some compromise

DNT is a compromise. If we were unwilling to compromise, we would build ad-blockers into browsers as a default, much like pop-up blocking ten years ago. It was because of people like you who would not stop whining about how important advertiser dollars are to keep the web alive that we even considered something like DNT. It was because advertisers promised that they really do respect our wishes, that ad blockers and legal restrictions on tracking are not needed, that DNT was ever considered by anyone.

The advertisers showed their true colors. They never wanted a compromise, they just wanted a facade that allows them to pretend they respect us while continuing to do what they have done all along.

It was because of people like you who would not stop whining about how important advertiser dollars are to keep the web alive that we even considered something like DNT.

Ads are why so much of the internet is free. I dont have to like it, you dont have to like it, but ads are why youtube is making a profit and why its still alive / free (remember the days when it was wondered, "when will google shutter this money sink?"). Ads are the very reason for Slashdot's current existence, why search engines exist, etc.

If adblockers were built into browsers by default, can you think of a single reason for yahoo and google to continue providing search engines? Or exist? Gee, there

No. DNT was a compromise. It was a feature with one purpose, to reflect the desire of the user not to be tracked. When a certain company with a certain shithouse browser decided to turn it on my default in a software update all for a bit of temporary marketing, DNT ceased reflecting the desire of the user. The ad companies were on board with it too as the likely people to click DNT were the ones unlikely to click ads to begin with.

It wasn't until a large percentage of users unknowingly ended up with a brows

You missed the part about advertisers already refusing to respect the existing DNT flag and only being willing to cooperate at all if uit didn't actually require them to change anything in response to the flag.

W3C was right to tell them to get stuffed. Why let them do nothing and then pretend they somehow cooperated?

it says a lot for the people that bought into the DNT, they'll buy into just about anything. Uncheck your third party cookies in your browser and that should take care of them tracking you to other sites. I have a multi purpose firewall that kept finding tracking cookies until I cut out third party cookies now it doesn't find any.

Sure, cookies make things markedly easier(since data persistence is what they do, in a sort of feeble, hacky way); but there are so many more bits of information available if you want to fingerprint a user. Even better, the ones that squirm the hardest against the easy methods tend to end up with the most unusual configurations.

A Firefox plugin to impede fingerprinting-based tracking while maintaining browsing experience.
You may download and install the demo version of the extension by clicking the link below. This is not the final version; it is recommended to check this page regularly for updates. We welcome your remarks and suggestions - you may contact us using the Contact page.

How in the red-bleeding-fuck do you construe any kind of entitlement from my statement? Having worked with marketing departments I can say that in fact, they are more often than not a bunch of business major douche-bags with a very tenuous grasp of anything more than milking as much money from EVERY SINGLE PERSON THEY ENCOUNTER. I'm not saying anything about how i/we deserve anything. Fuck man get a grip.

Then stop visiting those sites if you dont like the terms. This isnt rocket science. If you go to a supermarket and they insist on following you down the aisle making suggestions, the solution isnt to pass a law, its to stop going to that supermarket.

Stop trying to burden society with more rules just because u cant be arsed to change your browsing habits, or because you think you are entitled to a private website's content.

Actually, the solution is to pass a law. Supermarkets shouldn't be allowed to invade people's privacy just because they can, and people shouldn't have to be on the lookout for privacy breaking dirty tricks from every possible place they might visit.

Let's ensure the greatest good for the greatest number. For every N people, there is 1 supermarket. It's more utilitarian to make it easy for N people to live their lives in peace and add a burden to 1 supermarket, than it is to make it easier for 1 supermarket

The vast majority of the content consumed on the net today is adsupported, and would either be paywalled or non-existent without ads. Youtube? Hulu? Facebook? Slashdot? Their reasons for existence are to make money, and they do that mostly through ads (hulu also has a paywall section).

All those news sites you read-- you think theyre there as a public service? For all the complaining that people do about NYTimes paywalls, they sure dont seem to want to even contemplate the possibility of ads; one wonde

There's a real difference between blocking ads and blocking tracking. I have little interest in blocking non-animated ads, but I don't want to be tracked. Sadly, the easiest way to block the tracking is to block all ads.

Frankly, if a site like/. can't survive without ads, then I don't care. Bye bye. There are loads of sites that have news without ads (check the national broadcasters for some examples). Facebook = do not want anyway, I'd love to see them die. Video sharing or steaming sites? Meh, fuck 'em. I don't use them anyway.

I am confident that most of the sites that I visit regularly would still survive without advertising (though it maybe harder). Maybe they have to implement some sort of bonus scheme for people who

What is the problem here? Why couldn't the web browser just make sure that the cookies are passed via RFC3514 ( http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3514.txt [ietf.org] ) compliant packets (with the E bit field set to FALSE) if the advertiser is trustable?

"Do Not Track" is pretty clear. It means "do not track," without exceptions, without room for debate.

This fiasco has basically proved what everyone knew from the beginning, which is that advertisers do not give a damn about people who do not want to be tracked. Luckily, we have a technical solution to the problem: ad blockers. Much like spam filters and pop-up blockers, ad blockers are the solution to advertisers who have no respect and who cannot be trusted.

When my CPU is spinning because of your Javascript-super-fancy-tracks-all-the-things advertisement, you are consuming my resources. When I have to download a megabyte of Javascript/Flash/whatever to see your ads, you are consuming my resources. When I have to spend time trying to navigate around annoying hover ads, you are consuming my resources.

At least when I receive spam, I know the spammer has no idea who I am or whether or not I opened their message. Website advertisers try hard to track everything, even when you are very clearly trying to stop them; that is what DNT has demonstrated.

Ads are implicitly requested when you visit an ad-supported site

No, the page is what is requested. My browser is not obligated to do anything at all with the webpage your server sends it. There is no implicit request; you explicitly asked my browser to request ads from the advertisers you choose to do business with.

People making a big deal about this should perhaps rethink why they are entitled to someone else's work (the website) without respecting their terms (the ads).

You put your work on the open web. You did not put it behind a paywall. You did not force me to view your ads before seeing your page.

Nobody wrote an ad blocker because they were angry about textual ads or banner ads. Ad blockers exists because the advertisers have no respect for anyone's desire to not be tracked, to not have hover ads, pop-ups, pop-unders, Flash, Java, and other adware annoyances. Advertisers have shot themselves in the foot with their own greed, and if your website is not saying, "No, I do not want you to piss off my users with these antics" then your website is part of the problem.

A webpage consists of multiple resources, often spread over multiple servers and delivered by multiple servers.

My browser is not obligated to do anything at all with the webpage your server sends it.

Thats true; you can filter the data with a large number of extensions, to strip out ads.

There is no implicit request;

Youre right-- its an explicit request. If you were to fire up wireshark, you would see zero requests coming from the website, and many coming from your machine to various web addresses-- including advertisers. That you dont understand the ramifications of your GET request isnt really relevant; thats how browse

So if I run an ad-blocker so my browser doesn't request the ads, all is good?

I'm fine with actual ads on a website. It's the animated crap, the humongo flash programs and the bad attempts to give me a virus by tricking me into thinking I already have one, and burning up CPU cycles like it's a contest to see who can use the most that must go.

In return for website owners not getting too bent out of shape about that, I don't hold them responsible for the content of the ads that display on their site with their

There is no such thing as a trustworthy advertiser. Their profit is directly tied to ad views and they have repeatedly demonstrated that they have no respect for privacy or one's desire to not be force-fed their crap.

I heard somewhere that Apache webservers now explicitly block "Do Not Track" requests from IE browsers. If you can't even count on your webservers to comply with DNT, what good are standards going to do?

Apache ignores DNT from versions of IE that have it enabled by default because it's supposed to be something that the user specifically enables, not a blanket "hey ad industry, completely ignore this because it's always on" option.

Apache ignores DNT from versions of IE that have it enabled by default because it's supposed to be something that the user specifically enables, not a blanket "hey ad industry, completely ignore this because it's always on" option.

No, Apache ignores DNT from IE 10 basically because the head of Apache works for Adobe, and Adobe doesn't like the idea of users not being tracked by default.

FWIW I use Firefox on a Mac, and I disable third-party cookies and run Ad-Block Plus.

From a user interface perspective, I think it makes sense to pick as the default the value that most users would like it to be at. And while I have no research to back this up, I'm assuming most users would prefer not to be tracked.

Their changes are public, so you could have looked for yourself to find that change was reverted in October last year after only being alive in the upstream repositories for a whopping 2 months. Please don't repeat hearsay if you aren't going to verify it.

That happened last year, but it was only for a month. The patch to disregard DNT from IE was actually made by one of the authors of the DNT standard in response to IE catastrophically mutilating the standard, but they soon decided that messing with Apache wasn't appropriate and reverted the patch.

Actually MS followed the standard, but the people at the standard were pissed that MS implementation meant most people would be protected if it was honoured so like all fucked up bodies they changed the standard to screw over users.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy defines the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as "a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes," with a footnote to the effect that the editors would welcome applications from anyone interested in taking over the post of robotics correspondent.

The advertisers actually came up with a proposal that said something like ``Well, what we'd like to do is that when the browser user chooses to not be tracked, we'll track them anyway. Would you folks find that acceptable?" Incredible.

I could make some money. In fact if you send me 20 dollars and a stamped envelope, I'll send you a brochure on how you too can become a millionaire with this amazing opportunity... all from your home office.

It's not so much a question of the companies respecting it as that they're on notice about it. It's like a no-trespassing sign on a fence. It may be easy to hop over the fence, and it doesn't actually stop anyone who intends to trespass. They can't, however, claim they didn't realize they were trespassing if they have to climb over a fence that at every point along it would've had at least one no-trespassing sign visible to them. That makes it much easier to deal with them when they get caught trespassing.

Casualty: uninterrupted TV--the dancing dinosaurs that interrupt regular programming are a direct result of advertisers trying to find a way around TiVo. Ditto for banner crawls during newscasts.

Casualty: Movies free of product placement. Probably a casualty of TiVo also

Don't blame TiVo. Product placement was visible in movies in the 1970s, long before TiVo. Watched "Ice Castles" the other night and was surprised at the number of blatant Coca-Cola placements throughout. And the alien E.T. eats Reese's Pieces because Mars Inc (M&Ms) turned down the opportunity.